White Suns, Fire-Toolz, Venomenema, Instinct Control

Event Details

Dana Matthiessen and Kevin Barry of White Suns plunge their audience into abstraction as their synthesizers, cut-up samples, guitars, and lurching rhythms form a tapestry of shifting layers. They focus above all on texture and atmosphere, utilizing repurposed aspects of drone, industrial and harsh noise to create claustrophobic soundscapes that ripple and groan. The band has released four full-length albums since coming into existence in 2006 – Waking In The Reservoir (UgExplode, 2011), Sinews (Load, 2012), Totem (The Flenser, 2014), and Psychic Drift (The Flenser, 2017) – along with a handful of small-run releases.

Fire-Toolz is one musical moniker used by a consciousness that has taken the physical form of a transfemme non-binary human named Angel Marcloid. Though her work fits under the wide umbrella of beat-focused electronic production, Fire-Toolz sculpts her tracks from warped signifiers of genres including jazz fusion, electro-industrial, new age, black metal, prog, and noise improv. Far from a passing tourist cherry-picking the juiciest chunks of each of these traditions, Angel has worked through an improbably rigorous musical self-education that seems to compress several entire discrete lives into one. Her live sets unite her dense sounds in all their rapidfire transitions with her own overloaded, collage-like video productions. Her most recent release, Skinless X-1, arrived in 2018 on LP and CD via Chicago experimental label Hausu Mountain.

Instinct Control is a project of Ryan ⊥ Dunn primarily utilizing the unintended, soul-salvage of planned obsolescence through direct physical contact with the circuitry of tape players. Instinct Control considers instrumentality, expectations and the musician’s gesture—resisting the implied philosophies of settings, knobs, planned instruments, reveling in chance and dialogue, performing sound with an object which is fickle to changes in environment and performer.